MUMBAI: Zensar has ditched the bell curve, is revitalising its internal communications and is bringing in more transparency into how it pays employees, as the mid-sized IT company overhauls its human resources policies. The company is betting on transparency as a way to retain talent and boost employee satisfaction.

"We have totally reworked our internal communication,"Syed Azfar Hussain, global HR head at Zensar, told ET. "In our performance appraisals, the evaluation and promotion criteria weren’t shared with the associates and there was a sense that people were playing favourites, which wasn’t the case.”

Communication and transparency was a problem because Zensar had eliminated a ‘bell curve’ based rating system 15 months ago but even the company’s senior management had not realised the change had been made. "We finally built a model of a bell and on the 26th of January we set it on fire to get the message across that the forced ranking system was no longer in use,"Hussain said.

Several IT companies including TCS and Wipro have gotten rid of the bell curve system.

Hussain said that company was also hoping to move towards a system of publishing its paybands to help employees understand their salaries. "We have benchmarking surveys, and we want to be able to publish this data so that employees can see what a ‘Java programmer with X years of experience’ gets paid in a small company and in large company.”

The company has also created a slew of mobile applications, including one for digital time tracking.